Klaxons: Surfing the Void

We talk with guitarist Simon Taylor-Davis about the awesomeness of Space Cat

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

The cover of Surfing the Void, the second Klaxons album (out August 23 on Polydor), is a picture of a cat in a spacesuit. That's kind of all you need to know. It is both awesome and nuts. Pitchfork spoke with Klaxons guitarist Simon Taylor-Davis about how this particular image came to be.

Pitchfork: Whose cat is it?

Simon Taylor-Davis: The cat actually belongs to Jamie [Reynolds], from our band. That's his cat Orphee. We got friends of ours, Mads Perch and Richard Robinson, to take photos of the cat and photos of the suit, and we used the magic of Apple tools to edit it all together.

Pitchfork: So there wasn't any attempt to put a cat in a suit just to see how that would look?

STD: I'm not sure how fair that is on the cat. Obviously, you have the problem of the size of the suit as well. But, no, the whole operation was all done with the safety of the cat paramount.

Pitchfork: What was the inspiration behind the image?

STD: It's actually from an image that was a Tumblr community image that's been around for a few years. It's an image that was quite similar that was going around. It's a cat in a spacesuit with an American flag. It's not really identical. We had it as a desktop screensaver at the time we were making our record, and it was just this really hilariously inspiring, iconic image that we couldn't stop falling over laughing at every time we did a take. Ross Robinson, who recorded our record, yelled, "Space Cat!" every time we did a take. So the cat became a kind of mantra for the record.

Pitchfork: So there's no deeper meaning for the cat?

STD: Well, on on our last record, the back of our record was actually a collage of space images that we made from different Hubble images or whatever. We just find it really funny that in the last couple of years in England, every single new band around has seemed to incorporate triangles and something vaguely cosmic into their works. We just thought it was really funny to say, "Yeah, here's the cat. He's been into space. So fucking what? He's back. And it's a hell of a lot better here." That was our thinking behind the cat. He's been to space, and he's not really bothered by it.

Pitchfork: So the cat's not preparing for launch?

STD: No, the cat has returned. I did an interview with someone the other day that was really funny. He thought the whole of the record had been written from the perspective of the cat, which I really liked. But sadly it's not true.

Pitchfork: Maybe that will be the next one.

STD: Yeah, The Chronicles of Space Cat.

Pitchfork: What's the logo on the flag behind him?

STD: It's Klaxons' newly updated logo. Before, we had this weird, funny luminary triangle that we sketched out. This time, we've gone for the "O", which is the nice universal symbol of the round circle, which has kind of threaded this record. It's very much the image of the circle, and it's our-- kind of-- flag. It took a while to get a flag that didn't really look like a flag. When you try and make a flag not look like a flag, it starts to look like all kinds of other things. But it's the Klaxons' flag, and it appears throughout this record a lot.

Pitchfork: Are you going to fly it from the stage or anything?

STD: I think you've got to worry when you start flying flags. There's a lot of political connotations that come with waving flags around the stage. But the flag will make an appearance. I think it's more likely to be draped around an instrument than waved around.

Pitchfork: It would also be amazing if you got a giant animatronic Space Cat to come out behind you onstage.

STD: Funny you mention that. The first show I ever saw was Meat Loaf, and it was on the Bat Out of Hell tour. Meat Loaf actually had a huge 20-foot bat behind him. Smoke came out of the bat's nose and his eyes glowed red-- which is still one of the most mindblowing productions I've ever seen. So maybe there's room for the cat.

We've just actually designed a slight, different variation of the cat. In England, in a certain kind of record store, you get an add-on slipcase on the top, like a special edition, and we've just done a different variation of the cat. The cat's kind of got his mouth open on this one, and there's plans to make more animated cats. So he'll kind of come into his own as the record spreads out, hopefully.

Pitchfork: This will be the third big indie album that comes out this summer with a cat on the cover. Best Coast and Wavves both put out albums with cats on the covers. Guess it's a trend.

STD: Wow. Is that subliminal? I mean, it's interesting when you talk about the cat as an icon, as opposed to the dog. The cat's very much about reincarnation, and it's an incredibly spiritual character. I don't know if people are becoming more spiritually aware of their actions or if that's reading into it a bit too much-- if it's purely a chance coincidence. I can't think of any other animal that's appeared three times on album covers in a year. And MGMT had the cat as well. Was that a cat on their cover?

Pitchfork: I pictured that as a squirrel or something.

STD: A few people have wondered whether that's a cat or an unclassifiable creature. The only thing we're slightly worried about is the billboard which we're going to have in the UK with the album cover on it. These billboards tend to be on main roads. There's a very famous ad in England for the Wonderbra. I think there was like a Claudia Schiffer Wonderbra ad that apparently caused too many crashed cars, so we're very worried about the positioning of the cat. We don't want to cause any accidents.

Pitchfork: You're highly overestimating the attractiveness of the cat.

STD: [laughs] Well, we've had nothing but outbursts of absolute laughter from every single person who's seen it. Or else they ask if that's actually our album cover. We had it on little posters for our show last night for the first time, and it's quite a striking image.

Note: After the interview, Taylor-Davis emailed us this history of cats in space.